Description
Who ever could have imagined?
We were twelve shaky, newly sober alcoholics in a down-at-the-heels halfway house in Montgomery County, Maryland, near the District of Columbia. But our actions would set the stage to revolutionize thinking in alcohol and drug recovery in the United States, providing a system and encouragement for many hundreds of thousands of people to furnish themselves shelter. And once in new quarters, they would give each other enough nurturing and understanding to get a toehold on sobriety, self-respect and new lives.
People in Alcoholics Anonymous and the recovery businesses like detoxes, hospitals and rehabilitation centers had always known that alcoholics, many of whom had lost everything, needed a stable, supportive place to live in the early months of sobriety, or most resumed drinking.
But who would provide large-scale housing for such a dubious population? Governments weren’t in the housing business for alcoholics. The few local government and not-for-profit organizations providing halfway houses found themselves having to deal with real estate, regulation, fund-raising and management for small populations. NIMBY problems were predictable, especially when the word “homeless” was mentioned, and many alcoholics fit the definition.
The upshot was that most alcoholics returned from early AA meetings and rehab facilities, moved to problematic neighborhoods where they had spent their drinking years, or to toxic family situations, and the outcomes were often poor.
Little did we suspect that our ragtag group of men in the first Oxford Houses, because of our creativity and generosity in helping expand the concept of self support and independent living, would fundamentally change thinking in the recovery world.